Monday, March 4, 2013

You have to wonder if the corporate executives dealing
with Europe’s horsemeat food crisis haven’t just thrown their hands up in
sardonic frustration and shouted “it was horsemeat,
people, not horse s***!”

Be a dear and pass the Pepto-Bismol please!

Seriously, though, it’s cold comfort for the millions of
Europeans who’ve been left with an unsettled stomach over the unfolding food
scandal. And while there’s been a concerted
effort on the part of Burger King, Tesco, Nestlé and others to address the meat
recall across the continent – including the suspension of IKEA’s famous Swedish
Meatballs – it hasn’t prevented social media from turning the crisis into
one of misappropriated humor. There’s also been plenty of finger pointing at
the failure of Big Business to protect the quality of the products they
distribute, no matter where their third-party processing and distribution
operations may be located.

And while that story was souring hearts and stomachs,
another communications
problem was gathering momentum stateside: the Newspaper Association of
America, the New York Times and other newspapers joined The Associated Press in
support of its lawsuit against Meltwater, a company that tracks and monitors
media stories as related to client needs, but allegedly copies whole article
leads and headlines without paying proper licensing fees to the AP.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

Whether Meltwater wins or loses the eventual lawsuit probably
doesn’t much matter in the court of public opinion. As a media agency they’ve
only furthered the age-old belief that the PR industry is filled with nothing
but “hacks and flacks.”

Both stories reminded me of a more encouraging PR Daily
article by Dorothy
Crenshaw, CEO and creative director of Crenshaw Communications, named
one of PR’s 100 Most Powerful Women by PR Week. Her article, How to Think Like a PR
Person,
articulated some of PR professionals’ most valuable skills. And by doing so,
underscored that proper PR executive-think is very similar to the standards journalists
hold high. In reality, this is a recipe that also works for corporate execs
independent of their communications partners – something the horsemeat industry
and Meltwater could learn from and use right now.

Crenshaw’s most relevant points included:

·Think
in sound bites: Talk about food for thought. This isn’t just a good idea for pitching
media. It also helps condense one’s thoughts into step-by-step processes, more
like an equation. When a company is in crisis mode, as IKEA and others are,
this is particularly important.

·Media
training is essential: For similar reasons , media training is also about
clarity of thought and preparation for difficult questions – ideal for Twitter
and 140-character space restrictions – whether the questions are coming from news
outlets or everyday consumers.

·Voraciously
consume media and content: Note, this does not say, “voraciously copy and
paste media content.” For PRs pros this boils down to what I call “news
aggregation with a point” – embrace the hyperlink, attribute constantly, and
draw conclusions from the data used, helping prevent Meltwater-like
accusations. (Exactly what this post does) From a corporate standpoint, knowing
the news helps put immediate successes or crises in perspective.

·Look for
trends: Trends help connect the proverbial dots and can help draw
conclusions from the above news consumption and content. For instance, if I
were representing IKEA or another food brand right now, part of my voracious
consumption of news would include data on the last time a food recall of this
magnitude had occurred in Europe. I’d also be clamoring for positive data
showing that incidence of these events has fallen to their lowest level in
decades and the number of people taken ill has been negligible. Such trends
help blunt the emergency of the immediate.

As I wrote earlier, whether it was horse meat or horse
s*** doesn’t much matter to those affected by the tainted products. Hopefully
this new week will see PR’s trot return to a gallop as communications and
corporate executives consider this advice. Take that from the horse’s mouth and not from its rump!

Vanessa Who? ThinkInk What?

Vanessa Horwell is the Chief Visibility Officer and founder of ThinkInk, a creatively-driven PR and visibility agency that shuns press releases in favor of storytelling. She's spent the past 15 years working with companies in the US, UK and Europe, developing clever campaigns and strategies for their brands. She founded ThinkInk in 2004, after being fed up with PR agencies that offered only more of the same. Vanessa and her team of ThinkInkers work with companies in North America and the Caribbean, UK, Europe and Australia to improve their visibility through strategic public relations and new media channels. You can reach her at info@thinkinkpr.com to learn more